Linux Top 3: Gentoo Forks udev, Peppermint Respins and Linux 3.7 RC7

Linux Top 3: Gentoo Forks udev, Peppermint Respins and Linux 3.7 RC7

November 19, 2012

1) Udev Fork

There are more than a few folks that aren't happy with the current direction of systemd and the udev device manager. One of those folks is none other than Linus Torvalds who recently called out udev development as entering into 'crazy mode' where known problematic changes are introduced.

"After speaking with several other Gentoo developers that share Linus' concerns, I have decided to form a team to fork udev," Gentoo developer Richard Yao wrote in a mailing list posting. "Our plan is to eliminate the separate /usr requirement from our fork, among other things."

Gentoo developers could also potentially be joined by Debian developers in what could turn out to be a groundswell of protest against the Red Hat led developments in systemd.

"As Gentoo guys and some major kernel people are protesting about the insanity Kay and Lennart have done to udev, probably this is a window of opportunity to stop being annoyed in Debian, by brutal RedHat decisions which we don't necessarily (have to) agree on (eg: move to /usr, merge with systemd, etc.)," Debian developer Thomas Goirand wrote on the Debian developers mailing list.

Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, one of the original authors of udev has chimed in on the Gentoo fork and he isn't all that convinced it will succeed.

"As I posted elsewhere, working on a project based on "hate" only lasts so long," Kroah-Hartman wrote on a Gentoo mailing list. " I should know, that's the reason I started udev in the first place over 9 years ago.You need to have a real solid goal in place in order to be able to keep this up in the long-run. Otherwise you are going to burn yourself out,and end up alienating a lot of people along the way."

2) Peppermint Three Re-Spins

Peppermint Three came out and the end of July. Peppermint is a cloud/desktop hybrid Linux operating system that is based on Lubuntu, the LXDE variant of Ubuntu.

With the new respins, Peppermint users get updated installation media for the July release. Beyond just a media update, there is also a noticeable desktop change that has been made.

"We changed the desktop notifications back to the way they were in Peppermint Two after several users noted that the way they were implemented in Three seemed to be a bit of a step backward compared to the previous iterations," Peppermint developer Kendall Weaver wrote in his release announcement.

3) Linux 3.7 RC 6

What could be the final Linux kernel release of 2012 is now almost done. Linus Torvalds released the sixth release candidate for Linux 3.7 late Friday. With the U.S Thanksgiving holiday he's on vacation this week, but that might not stop him from putting out a release.

"I'll have a laptop with me as I'm away, but if things calm down even further, I'll be happy," Torvalds wrote. "I'll do an -rc7, but considering how calm things have been, I suspect that's the last -rc. Unless something dramatic happens."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.